Adaptive Co-Serving LLM Watermarking on Modern Inference Engines

Abstract

Large language model (LLM) watermarking is important for ownership verification and intellectual property protection. However, existing approaches focus on algorithmic design while treating LLM inference engines as separate components. This separation often introduces auxiliary models or external tools, increasing latency and memory overhead while limiting the use of modern inference optimizations. As a result, a deployment gap remains: practical watermarking must preserve utility, detectability, and robustness while minimizing serving overhead. To bridge this gap, we propose SWIFT, a framework that co-designs LLM watermarking with modern inference infrastructure. SWIFT (i) integrates text generation and watermark construction within a shared LLM backend to reduce re-computation, improve cache reuse, and simplify system complexity; (ii) uses instruction-guided candidate generation with semantic protection to preserve factual consistency and meaning; (iii) executes watermarking concurrently with generation through asynchronous co-serving and adaptive scheduling to reduce latency and improve resource utilization; and (iv) leverages vLLM optimizations to enhance serving efficiency. Extensive experiments across domains and tasks show that SWIFT achieves strong utility, detectability, robustness, and downstream performance while substantially improving serving efficiency. Specifically, it achieves the highest utility score (4.87), 99.65% detection accuracy compared with 76.65% for the low-latency baseline SynthID, and up to 97.7% detection under watermark removal attacks, with 5.9x lower latency than the highest-utility baseline, SafeSeal. These results demonstrate the benefits of co-designing watermarking with inference infrastructure for practical LLM serving.